Man Plus Page 11

  The other thing he was fretting about was that he could not avoid the secret feeling of sin that seemed to be a realization that internally, in his heart of hearts, he wished the project would be blown. He had had a tearful hour with Sister Clotilda when the probability that he would go to Mars had firmed up into the cutting of orders. Should they marry first? No. No on pragmatic, practical reasons: although there was not much doubt that both could ask for and receive the dispensation from Rome, there was also not much hope that it would come through in less than six months.

  If only they had applied earlier . . .

  But they hadn't, and both of them knew that they were not willing to marry without it, or even to go to bed together without the sacrament. "At least," said Clotilda toward the end, attempting to smile, "you won't have to worry about my being unfaithful to you. If I wouldn't break my vows for you, I doubt I'd do it for any man."

  "I wasn't worried," he said; but now, under the gleaming blue skies of Florida, staring up at the gantries that rose to reach for the fluffy white clouds, he was worrying. The Army colonel who had volunteered to show him around was aware that something was troubling Kayman, but he had no way of diagnosing the trouble.

  "It's safe enough," he said, probing at random. "I wouldn't give a thought to the low-injection rendezvous orbit."

  Kayman tore his attention away from his interior and said, "I promise you I wasn't. I don't even know what you mean."

  "Oh. Well, it's just that we're putting your bird and the two support launches into a lower orbit than usual: two twenty kilometers instead of four hundred. It's political, of course. I hate it when the bureaucrats tell us what we have to do, but this time it doesn't really make a difference."

  Kayman glanced at his watch. He still had an hour to kill before returning for his last fitting of Mars-suit and spacesuit, and he was not anxious to spend it fretting. He judged accurately that the colonel was one of those happy folk who like to talk about nothing as much as their work, and that all he need give would be an occasional grunt to keep the colonel explaining everything that could be explained. He gave the grunt.

  "Well, Father Kayman," said the colonel expansively, "we're giving you a big ship, you know. Too big to launch in one piece. So we're putting up three birds, and you'll meet in orbit—two twenty by two thirty-five, optimal, and I expect we'll be right on the money—and—"

  Kayman nodded without really listening. He already knew the flight plan by heart; it was in the orders he had been given. The only open questions were who the remaining two occupants of the Mars bird would be, but it would only be a matter of days before that was decided. One would have to be a pilot to stay in orbit while the other three crowded into the Mars-lander and went down to the surface of the planet. The fourth man should, ideally, be someone who could function as back-up to pilot, areologist and cyborg; but of course no such person existed. It was time to make the decision, though. The three human beings—the three unaltered human beings, he corrected himself—would not have Roger's capacity for surviving naked on the surface of Mars. They would have to have the same fittings he was going through now, and then the final brush-up training in procedures that all of them would need, even Roger.

  And launch time was only thirty-three days away.

  The colonel had finished with the docking and reassembly maneuvers and was getting ready to outline the day-by-day calendar of events on all the long months to Mars. Kayman said, "Wait a minute, Colonel. I didn't quite get that about political considerations. What does that have to do with how we take off?"

  The colonel grumbled resentfully, "Damn ecology freaks, they get everybody upset. These Texas Twin launch vehicles, they're big. About twenty times the thrust of a Saturn. So they make a lot of exhaust. It comes to something like twenty-five metric tons of water vapor a second, times three birds—a lot of water vapor. And admittedly there's some risk that the water vapor—well, no, let's be fair; we know damn well—excuse me, Father—that what all that water vapor would do at normal orbit-injection altitudes would be to knock out the free electrons in a big patch of sky. They found that way back in. let's see, I think it was '73 or '74, when they put the first Spacelab up. Knocked the free electrons out of a volume of atmosphere that stretched from Illinois to Labrador when it was measured. And of course that's what keeps you from getting sunburned. One of the things. They help filter out the solar UV. Skin cancer, sunburn, destruction of flora—well, they're all real; they could happen. But it's not our own people Dash is worried about! The NPA, that's what bugs him. They've given him an ultimatum that if your launch damages their sky they will consider it a 'hostile act.' Hostile act! What the hell do you call it when they parade five nuclear subs off Cape May, New Jersey? Claim it's oceanographic research, but you don't use cruiser-killer subs for oceanography, not in our Navy, anyway. . . .

  "Anyway," the colonel said, bringing himself back to his guest and smiling, "it's okay. We'll just put you into rendezvous orbit a little lower down, out of the free-electron layer. Costs more fuel. Winds up making more pollution, the way I look at it. But it keeps their precious free electrons intact—not that there's any real chance they'd survive across the Atlantic into Africa even, much less Asia. . . ."

  "You've been very interesting, Colonel," Kayman said courteously. "I think it's time for me to get back, though."

  The fitters were ready for him. "Just slip into this for size." The physicotherapist member of the team grinned. "Slipping into" the spacesuit was twenty minutes of hard work, even if the whole team had been helping. Kayman insisted on doing it himself. In the spacecraft he wouldn't have any more help than the rest of the crew, who would be busy with their own affairs; and in an emergency he wouldn't have any help at all. He wanted to be ready for any emergency. It took an hour, and another ten minutes to get out of it after they'd checked all the parameters and pronounced everything fine; and then there were all the other garments to try.

  It was dark outside, a warm Florida autumn night, before he was finished. He looked at the row of vestments laid out on the worktables and grinned. He pointed to the comm-antenna fabric that dangled from one wrist, the radiation cloak for use in solar-flare conditions, the body garment that went under the suits themselves. "You've got me all fixed up. That's the maniple, there's the chasuble, that's my alb. Couple more pieces and I'd be all ready to say Mass." Actually he had included a complete set of vestments in his weight allotment—it had seriously depleted the available reserve for books, music tapes and pictures of Sister Clotilda. But he was not prepared to discuss that with these worldly people. He stretched and sighed. "Where's a good place to eat around here?" he asked. "A steak, or maybe some of that red snapper you people talk about—and then bed—"

  The Air Force MP who had been standing by for two hours, glancing at his watch, stepped forward and spoke up. "Sorry, Father," he said. "You're wanted elsewhere right now, and you're due in, let's see, about twenty minutes."

  "Due where? I've got a long flight tomorrow—"

  "I'm sorry, sir. My orders are to bring you to the Ad Building at Patrick Air Force Base. I expect they'll tell you what it's all about then."

  The priest drew himself up. "Corporal," he said, "I'm not under your jurisdiction. I suggest you tell me what it is you want."

  "No, sir," the MP agreed. "You're not. But my orders are to bring you, and with all due respect, sir, I will."

  The physicotherapist touched Kayman's shoulder. "Go ahead, Don," he said. "I have a feeling you're in pretty high echelons right now."

  Grumbling, Kayman allowed himself to be led out and put into a hoverjeep. The driver was in a hurry. He did not bother with the roads, but aimed the vehicle out toward the surf, judged his time and distance and skittered out onto the surface of the ocean between waves. Then he turned south and gunned it; in ten seconds they were doing at least a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. Even on high-lift thrust, with three meters of air between them and the average height of the water, the roll
ing, twisting chop from the waves corkscrewing under them had Kayman swallowing saliva and looking for a throw-up bag against a rather possible need in no time at all. He tried to get the corporal to slow down. "Sorry, sir"; it was the MP's favorite expression, it seemed.

  But they managed to reach the beach at Patrick before Kayman quite vomited, and back on land the driver slowed to reasonable speeds. Kayman tottered out and stood in the damp, lush night until two more MPs, radio-alerted to his coming, saluted and escorted him inside a white stucco building.

  Before ten minutes had elapsed he was stripped to the skin and being searched, and he realized what high echelons he was indeed moving in.

  The President's jet touched down at Patrick at 0400 hours. Kayman had been dozing on a beach chair with a throw rug over his legs; he was shaken courteously awake and led to the boarding steps while refueling tankers were topping off the wing tanks in peculiarly eerie silence. There was no conversation, no banging of bronze nozzles against aluminum filler caps, only the throbbing of the tank truck's pumps.

  Somebody very important was asleep. Kayman wished with all his heart that he was too. He was conducted to a recliner chair, strapped in and left; and even before his WAC hostess had left his side the jet was picking its way to the takeoff strip.

  He tried to doze, but while the jet was still climbing to cruise altitude the President's valet came back and said, "The President will see you now."

  Sitting down and freshly shaved around his goatee, President Deshatine looked like a Gilbert Stuart painting of himself. He was at ease in a leather-backed chair, unfocused eyes peering out the window of the presidential jet while he listened to some sort of tape through earphones. A full coffee cup was steaming next to his elbow, and an empty cup was waiting by the silver pot. Next to the cup was a slim box of purple leather embossed with a silver cross.

  Dash didn't keep him waiting. He looked around, smiled, pulled off the earphones, and said, "Thank you for letting me kidnap you, Father Kayman. Sit down, please. Help yourself to coffee if you'd like it."

  "Thanks." The valet sprang to pour and retired to stand behind Don Kayman. Kayman didn't look around; he knew that the valet would be watching every muscle tremor, and so he avoided sudden moves.

  The President said, "I've been in so many time zones the last forty-eight hours that I've forgotten what the real world is like. Munich, Beirut, Rome. I picked up Vern Scanyon in Rome when I heard about the trouble with Roger Torraway. Scared the shit out of me, Father. You almost lost him, didn't you?"

  Kayman said, "I'm an areologist, Mr. President. It was not my responsibility."

  "Cut it out, Father. I'm not assigning blame; there's plenty to go around, if it comes to that. I want to know what happened."

  "I'm sure General Scanyon could tell you more than I can, Mr. President," Kayman said stiffly.

  "If I wanted to settle for Vern's version," the President said patiently, "I wouldn't have stopped to pick you up. You were there. He wasn't. He was off in Rome at the Vatican Pacem in Excelsis Conference."

  Kayman took a hasty sip from his coffee cup. "Well, it was close. I think he wasn't properly briefed for what was going to happen, because there was a flu epidemic, really. We were short of staff. Brad wasn't there."

  "That has happened before," the President observed.

  Kayman shrugged and did not pick up the lead. "They castrated him, Mr. President. What the sultans used to call a complete castration, penis and all. He doesn't need it, because there's so little consumable going into him now that it all gets excreted anally, so it was just a vulnerable spot. There's no question it had to come off, Mr. President."

  "What about the—what do you call it—prostatectomy? Was that a vulnerable spot too?"

  "You really should ask one of the doctors about this, Mr. President," Kayman said defensively.

  "I'm asking you. Scanyon said something about 'priest's disease,' and you're a priest."

  Kayman grinned. "That's an old expression, from the days when all priests were celibate. But, yes, I can tell you about it; we talked about it a lot in the seminary. The prostate produces fluid—not much, a few drops a day. If a man doesn't have ejaculations, it mostly just passes out with the urine, but if he is sexually excited there's more and it doesn't all pass out. It backs up, and the congestion leads to trouble."

  "So they cut out his prostate."

  "And implanted a steroid capsule, Mr. President. He won't become effeminate. Physically, he's now a complete self-contained eunuch, and— Oh. I mean unit."

  The President nodded. "That's what they call a Freudian slip."

  Kayman shrugged.

  "And if you think that way," the President pressed, "what the hell do you think Torraway thinks?"

  "I know it's not easy for him, Mr. President."

  "As I understand it," Dash went on, "you aren't just an areologist, Don, you're a marriage counselor, too. And not doing too well, right? That trampy little wife of his is giving our boy a hard time."

  "Dorrie has a lot of problems."

  "No, Dorrie has one problem. Same problem we all have. She's screwing up our Mars project, and we can't afford to have that happen. Can you straighten her out?"

  "Well, I don't mean make her a perfect person. Cut it out, Don! I mean, can you get her to put his mind at rest, at least enough so he doesn't go into shock any more? Give him a kiss and a promise, send him a Valentine when he's on Mars—God knows Torraway doesn't expect any more than that. But he has a right to that much."

  "I can try," said Kayman helplessly.

  "And I'm going to have a few words with Brad," the President said grimly. "I've told you, I've told you all, this project has to work. I don't care about somebody's cold in the head or somebody else's hot pants, I want Torraway on Mars and I want him happy there."

  The plane banked to change course away from the traffic around New Orleans, and a glint of morning sun shone up from the greasy oil-slick surface of the Gulf. The President squinted down at it angrily. "Let me tell you, Father Kayman, what I've been thinking. I've been thinking that Roger would be happier mourning over the death of his wife in a car smash than worrying about what she's doing when he's not around. I don't like thinking that way. But I have just so many options, Kayman, and I have to pick the one that's least bad. And now," he said, suddenly smiling, "I've got something for you, from His Holiness. It's a present; take a look at it."

  Wondering, Kayman opened the purple box. It held a rosary, coiled on purple velvet inside the leather case. The Ave Marias were ivory, carved into rosebuds; the big Paternoster beads were chased crystal. "It has an interesting history," the President went on. "It was sent back to Ignatius Loyola from one of his missions in Japan, and then it was in South America for two hundred years with the—what do you call them?—the Reductions of Paraguay? It's a museum piece, really, but His Holiness wanted you to have it."

  "I—I don't know what to say," Kayman managed.

  "And it has his blessing." The President leaned back and suddenly looked a great deal older. "Pray with it, Father," he said. "I'm not a Catholic. I don't know how you feel about these things. But I want you to pray for Dorrie Torraway's getting her head straightened out enough to last her husband a while. And if that doesn't work, you'd better pray real hard for all of us."

  Back in the main cabin, Kayman strapped himself in his seat and willed himself asleep for the remaining hour or so of the flight to Tonka. Exhaustion triumphed over worry, and he drifted off. He was not the only one worried. We had not properly estimated the trauma Roger Torraway would receive from the loss of his genitals, and we had nearly lost him.

  The malfunction was critical. It could not be risked again. We had already arranged for beefed-up psychiatric attendance on Roger, and in Rochester the backpack computer was being recircuited to monitor major psychic stress and react before Roger's slower human synapses could oscillate into convulsions.

  The world situation was proceeding as predicted. New York
City was of course in turmoil, the Near East was building up pressures past the safety valves, and New People's Asia was pouring out furious manifestos denouncing the squid kill in the Pacific. The planet was rapidly reaching critical mass. Our projections were that the future of the race was questionable on Earth past another two years. We could not allow that. The Mars landing had to succeed.

  When Roger came out of the haze after his seizure he did not realize how close he had come to dying, he only realized that he had been wounded in all of his most sensitive parts. The feeling was desolation: wiped-out, hopeless desolation. He not only had lost Dorrie, he had lost his manhood. The pain was too extreme to be relieved by crying, even if he had been able to cry. It was the agony of the dentist's chair without ahesthesia, so acute that it no longer felt like a warning but became merely a fact of the environment, something to be experienced and endured.

  The door opened, and a new nurse came in. "Hi. I see you're awake."

  She came over and laid warm fingers on his forehead. "I'm Sulie Carpenter," she said. "It's Susan Lee, really, but Sulie's what they call me." She withdrew her hand and smiled. "You'd think I'd know better than feeling for fever, wouldn't you? I already know what it is from the monitors, but I guess I'm an old-fashioned girl."

  Torraway hardly heard her; he was preoccupied with seeing her. Was it a trick of his mediation circuits? Tall, green-eyed, dark-haired: she looked so very much like Dorrie that he tried changing the field of vision of his great insect eyes, zooming down on the pores in her slightly freckled skin, altering the color values, decreasing the sensitivity so that she seemed to fade into a twilight. No matter. She still looked like Dorrie.

  She moved to scan the duplicate monitors at the side of the room. "You're doing real well, Colonel Torraway," she called over her shoulder. "I'm going to bring you your lunch in a little while. Anything you want now?"